SWLW #438: Don’t hire top talent (hire for weaknesses), Open-Sourced Career Ladders for Tech, and more.

Heya,

I hope that you and your family are doing well, and you are able to find a new rhythm in this hard situation.

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week -
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Don’t Hire Top Talent; Hire for Weaknesses.
6 minutes read.

Benji Weber's post will become my "go-to post" when people ask me how to structure a strong team. This is a beautiful framing: "Why are you hiring? Are you hiring to do more, or are you hiring to achieve more?"

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

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Culture

Actual Video of Startups Selling Their First Enterprise Deal
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Career Ladders for Tech, Open Sourced
10 minutes read.

Sarah Drasner shares a great resource that I think many can use and adjust to build an internal Career Ladder. Share it around at the office. Do you have a Career Ladder? Is it time to create one? Can you leverage this project to build momentum?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Seniorless — 4 Tips for Effectively Onboarding Juniors
6 minutes read.

Hiring inexperienced engineers is easy; it's investing in their onboarding and career growth that we often neglect. Inertia creates pressure to execute without paying enough attention to sustainability. Gabriel Grinberg helps to set the framework for a successful onboarding plan.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Why You Should Invest in Undervalued People
6 minutes read.

"Put another way, it’s ironic that an industry that tends to want to build everything instead of buying it chooses to buy the absolute most expensive thing on the market: talent." -- Joe Emison will give you something to think about during the weekend.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Jobs [sponsored]

Team Lead @ Nebulab (Remote)
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 Looking to hire for your team? Promote your open positions on SWLW! 

Peopleware

EMPOWERED Review: I Needed This Book 4 Years Ago
5 minutes read.

I thought that reading Gergely Orosz's book review for EMPOWERED would make you buy the book and read it (or listen to it). Worth your time.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


My #1 Tip for New Managers: Protect Your Energy. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Padmíní Pyapalí wrote a thread worth sharing with managers in your company. I love this one: "Don't fill up empty blocks of time just for the sake of it. If you have free time, use that extra time to come up with ways to create more free time. Revisit old documentation & processes. Plan for the future."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Software Engineering Leadership Is Not (Only) About Coding Well
4 minutes read.

Guy Gadon's scale-up vs. scale-out analogy is a helpful framing to think about your impact (and investment): "Scaling up your skills stands for getting better in writing code, creating architectures and building them, solving complex problems and creating and executing engineering plans. [...] So, how can we scale ourselves better? By scaling out! Scaling out engineering skills stands for the ability to grow other people around you, to make them as effective as you."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@rakyll: Him: Your GitHub gets less greener every other year. Me: If I autogenerate a commit for every meeting I attend, it’d look greener than ever.

@Suhail: Debug yourself: Optimism is more CPU. Focus is higher clock speed. Envy is a memory leak. Hurt is a segfault. Pessimism is a CPU core pegged at 100%.



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know.

If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me and my work by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.